All the World's a Joke and Larry Charles Is Just Pressing Record

Larry Charles is the comedic maverick who wrote for Seinfeld and directed Borat. He's funny -- and he thinks you're funny, too. He may even be filming you right now. Because Larry Charles believes his biggest jokes are yet to come. And we're all part of the punch line.

The Antichrist is a former drug addict from Puerto Rico with excellent teeth and a fairly sophisticated media organization on the outskirts of Miami. He preaches that since Jesus died on the cross, it's no longer possible to sin. You can drink your rum and smoke your smokes and screw your neighbors. Beyond that, the Antichrist's message turns cryptic. Beyond that... who cares? People like it when you tell them they can do whatever they want. A surprising number of people throw money in the Antichrist's direction. Being the Antichrist, turns out, is a pretty decent racket.

Still, as good as the Antichrist has got it, he's got it nowhere near as good as Larry Charles. Hardly anybody does. Larry Charles is the guy who got lucky -- the skinny kid from Brooklyn who drove out to L.A. on speed in his late teens and ended up writing for Seinfeld. The guy who now directs Curb Your Enthusiasm and produced Entourage and headed up a new pilot for HBO starring Kanye West. Larry Charles is the guy ten thousand guys in L.A. want to be -- the guy with money in the bank, with seventeen dogs, with the assistants, the production deals, and a BlackBerry gone spastic. He's the guy funny guys seek out when they endeavor to make funny things. Larry Charles is the guy who directed Borat. You know Borat. You know that Borat grossed $700 billion, and when that happens, everybody wants to talk to you seven hundred billion times more than they did when everybody wanted to talk to you all the time. Borat means that at least in this case, the Antichrist is right: Larry Charles can do whatever he wants.

So what the hell is he doing out here in the light industrial whatever lands of Miami? This part of Miami doesn't see cameras too often. We're out by the airport, an alternating circuit of shuttered strip malls and shipping centers. This doesn't even look like Miami. It looks like nowhere. Or everywhere. And for Larry Charles, everywhere is the perfect place to make a movie.

The movie he's making today is a "nonfiction comedy" about the role of religion in contemporary society. It stars Bill Maher doing what Bill Moyers usually does. Except where Moyers is hushed and solemn, Maher is cracking wise. It's Charles and Maher asking impertinent questions at the burka shop and at the Western Wall. They've shot in London and in Rome. In Jerusalem, Charles brought cameras into the Dome of the Rock. In Italy, he claims he filmed parts of the Vatican that have never been filmed before. He can do this because a Charles shoot is small and quick. "Essentially," he says, "we're making an epic for less than $3 million."

Larry Charles is here because after a lifetime of writing jokes -- for Fridays, for Arsenio, for Mad About You -- he is done with the shtick. It's not like he has given up on funny things; he's just chasing bigger game. "The world," he says, "doesn't need another broad comedy. We've got enough crap." And so the guy who can do whatever he wants is out here in nowhere/everywhere because he wants to change the way movies get made. Because he wants to get the kind of laughs that change the world.

Larry Charles wears his hair long and his beard longer. He wears a brown derby of the kind favored by forties-era gangsters and a What Would Jesus Do bracelet of the kind not often favored by fifty-year-old Jewish guys from Brighton Beach with wives and kids. Sometimes Charles looks like an elegantly aging hipster. At others, a well-put-together vagrant. Today, if you didn't know that Charles was one of the most profitable cats in American comedy, you might think he wandered to this curb off the street. You might be tempted to buy him a cup of coffee.

But there is no coffee here. Larry Charles is shooting a movie here, and that means there's nearly nothing to indicate that anyone is shooting a movie here. No trucks or trailers. No lighting rigs or dollies or craft-service tables sunk beneath the weight of so much coffee and cream cheese. At first glance, at least, there is nothing here but what there is -- a low-slung warehouse on the side of the expressway that's now home to the Creciendo en Gracia, the "church" where the Antichrist works his shtick. From a parking lot filled with minivans and Tauruses, a mostly Latino crowd of 100, maybe 150, shuffle past Charles in their Sunday threads into the warehouse.

If you look real hard, though, signs of film production begin to emerge. You become peripherally aware of a boom mic. You notice two guys you hadn't noticed before carrying high-def video cameras. They look like a couple of lost Oberlin grads, and their cameras feed images into a small monitor that Charles wears around his neck. A kid in Chuck Taylors over here, a girl in Uggs over there, and... and that's about the extent of it. The crew on a Larry Charles production is remarkably young and remarkably small. They cast no shadow. "The crew?" Charles says. "The crew fits in the van."

It's largely the same crew that worked for Charles on Borat -- young, without ego, and now battle tested. Sacha Baron Cohen isn't a United States citizen, so it was crucial to the production that he not get arrested. Charles and his crew made sure of that. They were held by police working the phone with lawyers as Cohen was shuttled away from the scenes that he'd created. "We were like bank robbers," Charles explains. "I had to draw maps of a place so we knew where our escape routes were."

Jeff Minton

When Charles talks about Borat, he alternates between sounding like a guy who has just pulled off the greatest senior-class prank ever and an auteur who has experienced a rather serious epiphany about twenty-first-century filmmaking. "All art today is postmodern art," he says. "When you look at Borat, you're seeing Charlie Chaplin, you're seeing Andy Kaufman, you're seeing a strange combination of things that are synthesizing into a unified whole." And then, as though afraid of coming off as a pretentious ass, he de-intellectualizes the whole deal so that making movies sounds quaint, like something you do because it's kind of fun: "We got on the bus and we went to different places, and we'd create havoc and mayhem and film it and get back on the bus and go to the next town. Jumping out, shooting, jumping back in, making stuff up -- that's the way I want it."

Here in Miami, Charles is taking the principle a step further. Here, he doesn't create the havoc. The Antichrist and his followers handle the heavy lifting on that front. And they go to great lengths to make sure that Charles has everything he needs. They ask him if he wants to sit up front in the reserved section. He declines. They offer him a headset that carries an English translation of the mostly Spanish service. He accepts. They even furnish him with a copy of their own master tape to supplement anything his crew misses and gladly post a sign that informs all congregants of the following:

"Please be aware that by entering this space you consent to your voice and likeness being used without compensation in films and tapes for exploitation in any and all media whether now known or hereafter revised, and you..."

Yadda, yadda, yadda. I could barely finish reading the thing, and I read English pretty well. Most of the congregants speak Spanish. I didn't see one of them stop to read it. None of them, in fact, pays Charles or his small crew much attention. He is deft in calling as little attention to himself as possible. He speaks softly. He moves deliberately. He recedes and he blends. For Borat, he cut the hair and the beard. Today, he and several of his crew members are dressed like the congregants. Charles has the strange ability to convey the impression that he belongs wherever he is.

When the service begins, Charles wears the video monitor around his neck and stares down at it. And that's pretty much all he does. What's most striking about watching Charles direct is how little "directing" he does. The set is what it is, and it's perfect, like something out of a Roger Moore-era James Bond flick. Or rather, it's two parts Octopussy, one part Sabado Gigante. What master of mise-en-scène could've dreamed a place as strange as this converted warehouse, with its pseudo-governmental seals and its fake imperial crests? Who would've cast the kid doing his Kenny G thing on the soprano sax, winningly awkward in his double-breasted suit? In terms of cinematography, Charles doesn't waste time looking for shots. He looks for coverage. Lots of it. For this project, which will probably end up running an hour and a half, he will shoot more than four hundred hours of video. The movie gets recorded out here in the world, but it will be made in the editing room. "The cutting process on his projects is like a writing process," says longtime Charles editor Jonathan Corn. "He likes to start with a long open cut. But he always has a plan. His skill is making it seem like there isn't one." Call it neo-neorealism. Call it hyperrealism. Call it whatever you want. Charles calls it antidirecting. "Any attempt to alter reality," he says, "only serves to diminish it."

The Antichrist, an ex-con from Puerto Rico named José Luis De Jesús Miranda, is like somebody out of... well, he's like some minor character Larry Charles might have created for an episode of Seinfeld. He could be a friend of Kramer's for sure. His sermon is almost entirely nonsensical, but he knows how to work a crowd. He knows how to preen. He has a nice strut. His signature move is this funny-creepy thing whereby he very slowly presses his index and middle fingers to his forehead. And when he does, the entire congregation points to their foreheads in precisely the same way. He takes off his blazer and lays it gently over a chair, then he rolls up his shirtsleeves nice and slow to reveal the number 666 tattooed upon his forearm. The congregation goes wild. Old women start jumping up and down, rolling back their sleeves and furiously scribbling 666 on their arms as well. They do it with Bic pens. They do it with lipstick. They wave their wrinkled arms in the air for all to see. It's not funny exactly; it's hysterical and sad and a little scary.

Charles watches all this play out on the monitor. He seems neither pleased nor surprised. He doesn't crack a smile. He wears shades. He almost always does, and with the dark glasses on, it's hard to know exactly what he's watching. After a while, you feel as though, behind the lenses, Charles is capable of watching many things at once. You come to think of a line from Emerson: "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all."

Jeff Minton

Long before he succeeded in becoming nothing, Larry Charles was nobody. Another kid from the neighborhood. "Lord of the Flies in Brooklyn," Charles says of his childhood. "That's where I grew up." He's been in L.A. thirty years, but his voice is still in Brooklyn. It's all stickball cadences and vowels pressed in the Coney Island streets. He sounds like a Ramone.

He worshiped at the altar of the Jewish comics who came before him, particularly those from his neck of the woods. "Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks," he says. "They were the Holy Trinity of comedy." But Charles is a generation younger than Brooks and Allen. His sensibility is faster and harder. Charles was into punk when punk was being born. He took trains into the city as a kid and gorged on Manhattan art-house fare -- Godard's Weekend, Jodorowsky's El Topo, and Waters's Pink Flamingos. He watched lots of TV and did lots of acid. "Drugs had a big impact on me," he says. "They fragmented my mind. I know there's another level of reality. I don't think Mel Brooks, as brilliant as he is, is interested in that idea."

Charles dropped out of college when his creative-writing professor told him that if he was a real writer, he'd get out of school and on the road. He came to L.A. broke, with nothing but a few funny ideas, in the mid seventies. "I didn't know how to get into show business. But I knew how to sell drugs. So I stood in front of the Comedy Store with jokes, and I tried to sell jokes like I used to sell loose drugs in Bryant Park. And eventually guys liked my jokes, started buying my jokes."

He landed a job writing for a sketch-comedy show intended to rival Saturday Night Live called Fridays. The humor was wacky. The bands were quality -- the Clash, Tom Petty, the Jam. The show lasted barely three seasons. Eventually, Charles ended up with a gig cranking out jokes for The Arsenio Hall Show. The only problem was that Arsenio didn't tell them. Here's a taste: "Today Gary Coleman was awarded a legal settlement reportedly worth millions...." (Pause for oohs and ahhs from audience.) "When asked what he planned to do with the money, Coleman responded that he planned to celebrate by whipping his ass with thousand-dollar bills." In six months, Charles never got one joke on air.

He said fuck it. If Charles has learned anything, he has learned that he must, in all situations, retain the ability and the confidence to say fuck it. "I always felt like if things didn't work out, I could sit in a room and write little stories. I was fine with that scenario." And then he got lucky.

Remember that show Fridays? Larry Charles got tight with another guy working on that show. Bald guy. Cranky guy. Another Larry with his own kind of wacked-out Brooklyn-born humor, his own freaked vision of the world. So in the early nineties, Charles started writing for this quirky sitcom with his friend Larry David, and, well, this is why the kid from Brooklyn drives out to L.A. in the first place. This is when Larry Charles becomes Larry Charles, the guy who writes for Seinfeld, the guy who writes some of its funniest episodes, the ones that seem a little extra-absurd. Like the one in which the library cop is played with surprising menace by Philip Baker Hall. Like the one in which Jerry and Elaine are stalked by a Pagliacci-loving madman. Like the one in which George turns purple.

After Seinfeld, Charles runs Mad About You for two seasons. He learns to work with actors, learns to be in charge. He learns to make money -- enough money to say fuck it with confidence for the rest of his life.

The only problem is that problem of what comes next. This is the problem Larry David solved with Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's the problem that Jason Alexander and Michael Richards couldn't quite figure out. After you've achieved the success -- the money, the well-fed kids -- what do you do after that? Most of us do what we've done before. We stick with what works. "In so much of comedy," says Curb executive producer Gavin Polone, "you feel that the punch lines are recycled versions of something else. One of these idiots walks into the coffee shop and says one thing, and you can almost anticipate what the other idiot is going to say. It's endless derivation, and it's mind-blowing to me that people still watch it. Larry doesn't ever stoop to that."

Of course, he doesn't have to. He knows he can do what he wants. And doing what he wants allows him to stretch the form, to innovate, to fail. Prior to Borat, Charles made one failure after another. He worked on a television show called The Tick. Critically acclaimed, it lasted half a season. A cult classic. He made a TV version of the comic strip Dilbert. It lasted less than two seasons. And after these failures, Larry Charles decided that he wanted to make a movie. So he wrote one. With Bob Dylan. Then he directed it. And got Bob Dylan to star. He also got Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange and Angela Bassett and Luke Wilson and Penelope Cruz and John Goodman and all sorts of famous people to act in it. Yet the end result was nothing like a Hollywood movie; it was a fever dream, like some dystopian vision of everything that's gone wrong since Bush versus Gore. The movie is called Masked and Anonymous, and it has grossed something like $500,000. It is not a cult classic. It has been widely ignored. "I know the boundaries are wide," he says. "And failure winds up being very important. The failures have forced me to reexamine everything. The failures fuel the next success."

Maybe. Listening to Charles, you almost believe that's true. But you also know he is no longer content to sit in a room and write little stories. You know that he makes things so that people will watch them -- lots and lots of people. Masked and Anonymous'sfailure to draw an audience still rankles. "That's the final part of the puzzle," he says. "I didn't succeed with that in the Bob Dylan movie, and I did with Borat. You see the difference in the impact."

This is the challenge facing all popular artists: How does one produce for a broad audience without simply embracing the lowest common denominator? Charles returns to this question again and again in thinking about the work he's done and the people he's worked with. "In Larry's case, in Bob Dylan's case, and possibly in Sacha's case, you're talking about very savantlike personalities," says Charles. "They don't have a choice. This is what they do. If you like it, great. If you don't like it, they're still going to do it. They can't adapt to the marketplace, and in a way that creates a purity."

But unlike his collaborators, Charles is cursed with too much versatility, too many options. The question he is trying to answer: How do you make an avant-garde film without making a movie that never gets seen? How do you generate laughter and thought? Borat is the closest Charles has come to getting an answer. He wants to pull off that trick again.

Jeff Minton

Today the cameras are rolling at the Holy Land Experience, in Orlando, fifteen miles northeast of Disney World. Thirty-five bucks gets you a day pass, and a day pass gets you an afternoon musical number called "Centurion," about a centurion who suspects that this Jesus fella might be the real deal. Old men in T-shirts walk hand in hand with little kids in centurion headgear. Later, there's another musical that might as well be called "Fake-ishly Gruesome Crucifixion Scene with Seventies-Era Musical Numbers." When the cross gets lifted into place up on Calvary, a giant Boeing crosses overhead to heartbreakingly anachronistic effect. The restaurant at Holy Land is called the Oasis Palms Café. There you can order a bowl of shepherd soup with a side of Elisha's bruschetta, or you can do like Larry Charles does and just get a hot dog.

At times like these, Charles's work must seem depressingly simple. Sitting there in shades with a monitor around your neck, waiting for the world to make fun of itself. A nice young man from Tennessee wanders over to where Charles is sitting. He asks politely about the film equipment. Charles shrugs his shoulders and says, "We're filming Holy Land." The young man has been digging Holy Land quite a bit, he says. He tells Charles that it's a great place to take his father, a reverend, who has been to the actual Holy Land more than once. As for him, this seems like the next best thing. Besides, his father, like many in attendance today, is old, and it's unlikely he'll make the trip to Israel again. Charles nods, listens politely to all of the story, and does not film. When the young man heads off to check out the Temple, Charles anticipates the question. "Sometimes," he says, "you just can't."

The day proceeds lazily. Charles smokes a cigarillo. He talks about Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, about the way in which Holy Land seems in some ways more real than anything they saw in Jerusalem. The thing nobody tells you about guerrilla filmmaking is how boring it can be. Having seen Borat, you wait for something crazy to happen, for somebody to dance naked on the steps of the Temple, for somebody to sacrifice a goat. As Charles reminds one impatient cameraman, "It's not us making what happens. It's us recording what happens."

As soon as Maher shows up, though, the vibe changes. It's like a generalized buzzing in the Holyscape. The patrons recognize him. Not like they can put a name to the face, but there's something about Maher that reeks of television. Heads turn. Somebody young whispers something to somebody old. People gawk. It's tempting to say that it's a little like when the zebras get their first whiff of the lion in the tall grass. It's tempting to say this because it's a little like that. The crew moves more quickly. Interviews are arranged with greater haste.

First up, a one-on-one with Holy Land Jesus.

His name is Les. He's tall, with an excellent beard and truly spectacular hair. Next to Maher, Jesus looks about seven feet tall, like an especially holy power forward from an ABA team with a roster full of catalog models. Jesus is, above all else, superfriendly. "Do you want me to lean against the tomb or something?" he asks no one in particular. On a Larry Charles shoot, nobody in particular is in charge of such things.

Maher and Jesus begin their interview. Jesus, it turns out, is a pretty serious believer in Jesus, and Maher, as you might've guessed, is not. Once this has been established, the exchange is fairly predictable. Maher scores the occasional zinger, but Jesus handles them all with Christian good humor. At times, you sympathize with the job Maher's been given. Debating Jesus? Who could possibly come out looking the better for it? The interview proceeds in this way for quite a while. Twenty minutes. Then forty. Charles seems cool with the leisurely pace. He looks down at his monitor, occasionally asking a follow-up question, one superpleasant dude with a long beard interviewing another superpleasant dude with a long beard.

In the end, that's the central thing that Charles does. He talks to people. He films the results. I wish I could tell you that he does something crazy genius in situations like this one. He does not. He stands very still. He radiates calm. He does not shout out directions or throw a fit because the light isn't reflecting off the fake tomb at the right angle. It does not suddenly occur to him to stage the interview underwater. He doesn't tell a PA to start making fart noises behind Jesus' back. The interview never turns wacky. It never seems anything less than reasonable and kind.

This doesn't prevent the Holy Land people from getting nervous. All day long the Holy Land people have been getting along nice-nice with the Charles people. They have made sure the Charles people spoke to whomever they wanted, let them know the best spots from which to shoot the crucified savior. But now something has changed. Now the young guy who has been Charles's liaison throughout the day has gone AWOL. When he returns, he returns with an officious red-haired woman in her forties, who begins circling the interview like an anxious parent. This woman's got "boss lady" written all over her, and it's clear that the boss lady is fixing to shut this interview down. But when she tries to, Charles's assistant swoops in. She moves in real close to the boss lady and gently, without even touching her, guides the boss lady away from the cameras. The whole process takes about fifteen seconds. It's not as though Charles's assistant says anything particularly persuasive to the boss lady. She hardly says anything at all. She asks, "What's wrong?" and then answers her own question, saying, "It's okay. It's okay." And with this, the boss lady seems reassured. Or actually, no. She doesn't seem the least bit reassured. She seems totally pissed and yet unable to do anything about it. She seems a little afraid.

It's not that one has any explicit reason to fear Charles. And yet it's surprisingly easy to fear him. It has something to do with the fact that Charles has a camera and you, alas, do not, and the camera seems like a very powerful thing, and the person in charge of the camera seems to be a very powerful person, and in this way it is possible, for the briefest moment, to confuse the camera with something dangerous. In fact, now that I recall the way the boss lady reacted when she came to shut down the interview, it was as though Charles's assistant had told the boss lady that she ought to back away real slow. It was as though she had whispered, You ought to back the fuck off, lady, because Larry Charles has a gun.

The tête-a-tête between Maher and Jesus goes on another twenty minutes. Then Jesus has to split to meet a busload of people from Missouri who have been waiting for more than an hour to meet with him. He literally runs to meet them, calling back to Maher, "Bill, if I don't get a chance to see you, it's been an absolute pleasure."

Jeff Minton

It's easy to feel as though everything that Charles is doing is an absolute pleasure. It's easy to feel as though everything Charles is doing is pretty fucking terrific. When you are in a movie theater laughing very loudly... terrific. When you are talking with Charles in his office about pushing the boundaries of film and about pushing America to view itself in new and different lights... terrific. When you are eating hot dogs in a place that re-creates the crucifixion every day at 4:25... terrific. It's terrific to think of Charles as some sort of twenty-first-century merry prankster, a prophet of the YouTube age who will change films by making them cheap, by making them light, and by making them matter. But then, it's also possible to feel something else.

It's a bummer to find out that Maher and Charles fly north from Holy Land on a private plane. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's only that when you've heard Charles talk about guerrilla filmmaking in the way that he does, in the bohemian, Dirty Dozen, collective-mind kind of way, it's deflating to learn that nowadays, only the lower-ranking crew members actually ride in the van. It's also a bummer to meditate upon the ways in which the films may come to resemble nothing more than so much reality television, the most recent reincarnation of Candid Camera, a bunch of very wealthy cats from Los Angeles jetting around the country and pointing their cameras at a bunch of unwealthy cats from Missouri.

New York is a bummer, too. At eleven o'clock on this Sunday morning, New York is cold, and it's not clear what Charles is planning to shoot, even as the crew assembles near Times Square. There's talk of heading out to Brooklyn, where you can find all-night shuls and the crazy folks who worship in them. Mostly, though, people hang out in the lobby of the Royalton hotel, not saying much, waiting for Bill Maher to show up. Charles sits among them, waiting patiently, working his BlackBerry.

Yesterday was a rare day off for Charles, who went with his brother to go see his father in Brooklyn. They drove around, mostly, bought some roasted peppers and a slice of pizza from his brother's favorite place. The last time Charles had any free time was weeks ago, back in Florida. He'd spent the night visiting his mother in Boynton Beach. Charles doesn't go out for dinner. Charles doesn't really take vacations. When asked why that is, he didn't understand the question. He said something about participating in the conversation, about making some kind of contribution, but really, the subtext was clear: It was, like, why would anybody want to do anything else?

Today the city seems to be collectively sleeping in. That's a problem. That's a problem because Charles has decided that this morning Maher will address the throngs in Times Square while disguised as a homeless man. Without the throngs, Maher will address himself not to the undifferentiated masses but to actual people, most of whom could give a shit. That's the reality of this chilly Sunday morning. And this reality will not do.

Production assistants are dispatched to various parts of the city in search of throngs.

As the crew continues to wait on Maher, the whole Dirty Dozen thing isn't much in evidence. One crew member talks emphatically about quitting. Another waxes nostalgic about getting arrested during the Borat shoot. (In between BlackBerry messages, Charles announces to nobody in particular that before Borat came out, he made himself write "Borat will be a phenomenon" fifteen times a day. He says we should make of this what we will.) The scouting reports come in bleak. The city, it appears, is throngless. It's decided that Times Square is where it goes down, with or without the masses. Finally Maher emerges in costume, wearing long hair and an even longer beard. As a homeless man, Bill Maher looks like Larry Charles.

It's difficult to imagine how funny one would have to be in order to pull off what they have planned. The scale of Times Square is simply too large to serve as proscenium for a lone stand-up comedian. Whatever Maher says here is going to drown in the vastness of the giant televisions, in the amorphous back and forth of the sightseers. He'll look crazy. Not funny crazy. Just crazy. And so waiting for him to mount the milk crate and begin is mildly agonizing.

But wait. It seems as though Maher doesn't want to do it. Or Charles doesn't want Maher to do it, or whatever has happened, it's clear that something's gone wrong or something is definitely not right, because nothing is happening at all.

And then Charles disappears. A white van pulls to a stop at a corner across the street. Charles's assistant hurries toward it. Her walkie-talkie squawks, and she turns to me. "Union Square," she says. "Meet us at Union Square." She climbs inside the van and is gone.

The subway to Union Square gets me there just in time to catch up with the van. But Charles is nowhere to be seen. I call his assistant. "Change of plans," she says. "Meet us at the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth."

On the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth, there is no van. There is nothing but what there is. The Plaza Hotel. FAO Schwarz. People. No throngs and no crews, no directors, just people. I can't find Charles anywhere.

I look for the white van. The city is full of them. I scan the streets for members of Charles's crew. Every twenty-five-year-old in the world looks like a member of Charles's crew.

Charles himself should be easy to spot -- the skinny guy with the long beard and shades, the guy making the movies, the one calling the shots. But the city is overflowing with guys carrying tripods, video cameras. Everywhere you look, it looks as though somebody is making a Larry Charles movie.

Or acting in one. I mean, look at that woman over there with the giant fur hat and the tiny furless dog. Check out the beautiful six-year-old posing with the human toy soldiers in front of the toy store, or the horses and buggies lined up along the margins of the park, blowing out smoke in the cold as their drivers yell into cell phones. It's all kind of absurd and funny. It's all kind of hysterical. Really, somebody ought to be filming all this. Somebody should disappear into the center of all this and set his cameras rolling.

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